Office furniture has gained utility beyond mere decorative furnishing and now commonly provides an important and necessary means for an individual at home or at their place of work to perform their daily tasks, paperwork and job functions. A key piece of office furniture, the desk, is at the center point of office furniture and provides a place to store items such as papers and files, a work surface to allow an individual to work, and in some instances, provides access to components such as electrical outlets and network connections. Without the desk, one can readily imagine the difficulty that would ensue in conducting and performing routine office work.
While the desk is an integral part of performing office work, some drawbacks exist. With the extensive and ever increasing amount of papers and number of peripheral devices associated with a desk, the work surface of the desk oftentimes becomes cluttered to a point where use of the work surface of the desk is impeded. Increased clutter on the work surface of the desk results in reduced usable space. Reduced usable space impedes daily operations and work performance as the individual simply has no place to work.
In an attempt to address these drawbacks, some devices provide, for example, a pop-up keyboard tray that hides the keyboard when it is not in use. Although such devices do increase the amount of space on the work surface, the pop-up device is cumbersome as it utilizes a number of rigid components and a spring ejection mechanism, and typically must be located at a front portion of the desk in order to provide sufficient room for the pop-up mechanism to operate. Additionally, a cover must be removed in order to expose the keyboard tray such that it can be popped up. Even after removal, the cover commonly still impedes much of the workspace of the desk as the cover is simply moved from one place on the desk to another. The present invention was developed in light of these and other considerations.